Friday, November 22, 2013

I was just over 3 years old when President John F. Kennedy was shot, so I barely remember the day. What I do remember is the overwhelming grief that adults expressed even years after it happened when we would see the anniversary in the newspaper or on TV.

So handsome, so gifted, so well-meaning - and much too young to die. At my house we didn't talk about all the conspiracy theories when I was a child - my parents were too grief-stricken - but as I got older, especially at school, we wondered why so many others were shot soon after: Robert Kennedy, Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King. Here in the south there was an feeling of fear that anything could happen at any time, that things had gone too far towards chaos. I was in second grade when M.L. King died, and while I was still too young to fathom the politics, I was ashamed and shocked that the shooting happened in Tennessee. So I have an inkling about how those in Dallas, Texas must have felt then and feel today over the assassination of John Kennedy. Things like this should never happen in our backyards, in the United States.

And yet there are those today who sit around on the internet, on Twitter and Facebook and every forum, seething and screeching and threatening Barack Obama, calling for someone to "stop his tyranny" through any means possible. That horrible type of madness just never goes away it would seem. The John Birch Society of that time has become the Tea Party of today.

What the Tea Party needs to understand is that the death of John F. Kennedy didn't stop progress or change from happening to our country. President Johnson and millions of others carried out the reforms of the Great Society. The Koch Brothers, whose father founded the John Birch Society, may still try to suppress the vote, but minorities and women are voting in ever higher numbers and showed last year that they will stand together for hours at the polling places in the name of Evers and King. We just re-elected Barack Obama, an African-American President. Many old enough to remember the death of John F. Kennedy never thought that day would come, and yet it did.

Peaceful change is the best revenge for all those deaths.

This week Caroline Kennedy became Ambassador to Japan. Standing with her was her son, who looks very much like her father and her late brother, John Kennedy Jr. History changes, and Teddy Kennedy may be gone forever now, but the legacy continues, both of blood and values.

The deaths of great people are not in vain. They inspire us and lead us beyond death.

Saturday, November 16, 2013

. . . pint-sized Miles Scott, 5. Miles is in remission from leukemia, and, thanks to the Make-A-Wish Foundation, managed to turn his obsession with comic book heroes into the real thing. Well, almost. There was no way Penguin was going to get away with anything on Friday.
. . . Miles, who lives in Tulelake in far Northern California, was diagnosed with leukemia when he was 18 months old, ended treatments in June and is now in remission.

His father, Nick Scott, thanked the Greater Bay Area Make-A-Wish Foundation and the estimated 7,000 people who were helping make his son's wish come true.
"All the doctors, nurses and all the other parents that have to deal with the same thing we're going through. I hope they get a conclusion to their illnesses like we're getting," Nick Scott told KGO-TV.

Friday, November 15, 2013

First the Republicans demonized Obamacare as "Death Panels" and "Socialism."

They even tried to shut down the government in order to "repeal it." Didn't work.

It's true there have been problems with the website, but what website in history didn't have glitches? The poutrage from all sides on social media is astonishing since Twitter and Facebook have their own share of problems from hackers and spammers to the KoobFace virus.

Obama even apologized on TV to Chuck Todd of MSNBC in a cringeworthy interview which never should have happened. There's no reason to apologize to media shills since Obamacare hasn't even taken effect yet, and people are still mostly shopping for plans. I have no doubt these kinks in the system will be worked out by January. Millions have already gotten new coverage under the program, including young adults who can now stay on their parents healthcare plans until age 26. Like my daughter for instance, who stayed on the family coverage while in Law School and who now has to buy her own plan as a practicing attorney. Her financial adviser just told her today her best bet for coverage in the coming year is . . . wait for it . . . Obamacare.

Apparently President Bill Clinton didn't get the memo. You remember Bill, the guy who wasn't able to pass his own healthcare initiative while in office, but has now decided to babble about Obama's failure to launch. This has been another moment of chagrin for most Democrats who want to keep our party together in 2014. The hotter heads among us are already saying they will not vote for Hillary in 2016 if Bill is going to attack Obama. That can't be good.

President Obama can thank Bill Clinton for the psycho-drama.
Instead of putting some steel into the spines of wavering Democrats, Clinton this week took the opportunity to rebuke the White House for its broken promise that no one would lose their health insurance under ObamaCare. The comments unleashed a no-holds-barred Democratic freak-out, pushing Obama to announce on Thursday a plan to make good on that vow.
. . . As one of the Democratic Party's most respected figures, his word still carries weight among the party faithful, particularly in red states where Obama is kryptonite. So when Clinton publicly chided the administration, it gave congressional Democrats acres of cover to do the same.

Yesterday it all came to a head as there was a revolt among Blue Dog House Democrats like Mary Landrieu of Louisiana who are trying to assauge angry vociferous voters in their districts whose health plans have been cancelled. This has actually affected a small number of Americans but you would think it was happening to every single person from the way the media is covering the story. The Emoprog media, Clinton and these turncoat-Demo-Rats apparently don't even understand what the whiners are whining about, or how ACA Obamacare works.

Why were the plans cancelled by these companies? Because their plans were craptastic to begin with, with high deductibles and almost no hospital coverage. The insurance companies who did this to customers weren't in compliance with the new law, so therefore had to cancel these ridiculous plans. Shall I add that any of those plans could have been cancelled for ANY reason even without Obamacare. Now that we have a "marketplace" of plans, all those policy owners have to do is go search out a new plan instead of whining to Fox and to their local Congressman.

But of course President Obama, who is the nicest and most patient President this country has EVER had, at least in my lifetime, explained it all again in terms even an ex-President can understand. And he said if those silly people want an extension on their horrible coverage, they can have it. I'm not as nice as Barack Obama, so I say to them: Good luck with that. See you next year when you smack your head and sign up for Obamacare.

I'll let the President have the last word - Listen, People!!!

“I’m accused of a lot of things, but I don’t think I’m stupid enough to go around saying, ‘This is going to be like shopping on Amazon or Travelocity’ a week before the Web site opens if I thought that it wasn’t going to work.”
. . . And you know, buying health insurance is never going to be like buying a song on iTunes. You know, it’s just a much more complicated transaction.”

Monday, November 4, 2013

It's good to go back to golden moments like the night in 2008 when the country elected our first African American President. We need to remind ourselves that change may be slow but impossible things sometimes happen in the United States of America.

In 2008, I wasn't blogging about politics and had never heard of Twitter. But I loved Obama the candidate with his glowing speeches that raised our spirits so beautifully. I knew if we as a nation could turn out the vote, Obama could beat John McCain and become the best President we had ever had in this country. And pleasantly, I still believe he is the best and brightest, and certainly one of the nicest Presidents in history. I still think we probably don't deserve him, even some of us Democrats who like to play the blame game as much as the Republicans.

But back in 2008 Sarah Palin and her rabid "Muslin-hating" Tea Party followers scared the living daylights out of the Democratic Party, and spurred some of us to send every spare dollar we had to the Obama campaign. And that made a huge difference. We should probably thank Palin for being herself, for encouraging the racists and libertarians to show up at her rallies, and for speaking so candidly in her nearly unintelligible way. She clinched the election for Obama, because the thought of Palin being a heartbeat away from the Presidency as John McCain's Vice President was too much to bear. Instead we got the amazing Joe "Malarky" Biden, and it was a "Big F***in' Deal." :)